Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: scriptingNews outline for 8/26/2000

Author:Paul Snively
Posted:8/26/2000; 11:51:18 AM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 8/26/2000
Msg #:20325 (In response to 20318)
Prev/Next:20324 / 20326

Dave Winer: It's the old Thomas Jefferson quote that I can never seem to find. Something like "If you keep an idea to yourself you own it. As soon as you tell someone else, everyone owns it."

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property." - Thomas Jefferson

You want a Jefferson quote, ask a Libertarian. ;-)

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